The uncomfortable truth
Are you ready for the next major digital outage, asks David Court.
Google services experienced an outage for roughly 45 minutes this week. The following services were all reportedly knocked offline: Gmail, Google Docs, G Chat, Drive, YouTube.
Google (@googlecloud) tweeted a half-baked explanation for what went wrong: ‘‘Today, at 3.47 AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. This was resolved at 4:32 AM PT, and all services are now restored.’’
It’s a bigger issue than it first appears, though. Gmail, Docs, Chat, Drive, et cetera are all part of Google Workspace (formerly G Suit), which is a service used by small and big – and very big – businesses all around the world.
Meaning for 45 minutes, a large percentage of global businesses were left stranded.
Fortunately for us, the timing of the outage was kind – 12.47am on Tuesday for New Zealand meant it didn’t affect the majority of Kiwis much at all. Lucky us.
But for Google users in Europe, the outage occurred right in the middle of their working day.
Forty-five minutes isn’t that long, you might think. And that’s true – but that three-quarters-of-anhour would have felt a lot longer to some. It also begs the bigger question: how much of our technology do we actually own? Hundreds of millions of workers unable to do their jobs properly through no fault of their company’s IT setup is a pretty unique situation to be in.
The question about how much of technology is owned by the user, of course, is something that’s been simmering for a few years now. Just last month, the outage of the server ‘‘AWS us-east-1’’ caused smart home products to malfunction across America.
And customers summed up their frustrations perfectly on Twitter, with @geoffbelknap – LinkedIn’s top information security official – tweeting: ‘‘I... can’t vacuum. . . because us-east-1 is down.’’
@SJP1804 added more colour: ‘‘My f***ing doorbell doesn’t work
Hundreds of millions of workers unable to do their jobs properly through no fault of their company’s IT setup is a pretty unique situation to be in.
because AWS us-east-1 is having issues.’’
Similar problems affected Apple and Microsoft services in September, too.
The list goes on, with regular entries all the way back to Sony’s massive PlayStation Network outage in 2011, and beyond then, too. Unfortunately, there’s not an obvious solution here.
Cloud computing is here to stay, and that’s largely a good thing, but the uncomfortable truth is that these outages happen all the time. Some are small. Some are big like this week. Some are bigger still. And they’re totally out of our control.
The only thing we can control is planning how we react in these situations. I guarantee it won’t be long before this happens again. And what then? Does your company have a plan to switch technologies instantly?
If not, why not? Admittedly, not everything can be planned for. Switching email servers, for example, isn’t a job that’s feasible in a matter of minutes. But switching all comms to Slack and pivoting to a new video-calling software definitely is achievable. Even inside 45 minutes.
Think of it as the equivalent of a digital fire drill. How well trained are you and your business in the case of a digital emergency?